


And light becomes what it touches.

by Kaesteranya



Category: Final Fantasy XIII
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-03
Updated: 2011-05-03
Packaged: 2017-10-18 22:32:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/194025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kaesteranya/pseuds/Kaesteranya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What we do, we do for...</p><p>A walk through Lightning and Snow's heads, and the girl holding them together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And light becomes what it touches.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is taken from the 31 Days theme for February 26, 2009. It references a line from the poem “Monet Refuses the Operation”, written by Lisel Mueller.
> 
> I took some liberties with back story details on both accounts.

The first time they met, he was a little less scruffy around the chin and she was wearing her very first pair of heels – a birthday gift, she’d explain later that evening, from her sister. She hadn’t been the first girl to ever slap him for commenting on her height/her rack, but she WAS the first one who bothered to stick around long enough for him to say sorry. And they had talked the whole night.

 

Serah is always and ever foremost in Snow’s thoughts, of course, even if they spend more time running for their lives than they do looking for some answers/trying to save Cocoon/fighting to get her back. She is what he wakes up to: what he sees in the reflection of the sun on water or through trees, what he hears in the wind and in that one moment each night where it seems like the whole world is asleep but him, what he smells in the rain and in fields of flowers. She is what he sleeps with: a collection of a million little fragments of memories, lodged just beneath his eyelids. And he swore that he wasn’t ever going to forget her, because she was alive. Crystalline, silent and breakable, but _alive_ , and he was going to set her free, and they were going to get married, and they were going to live together and grow old together, doing silly and stupid and wonderful things.

 

You only forgot about people when they were long dead, when it was already too difficult to move through the world, seeing their ghost at every turn. You lived for the living, telling everyone around you what your loved one was like, showing them, by example, just a bit of what they were in store for when they finally met her.

 

***

 

People who knew Lightning’s story used to ask her if she ever resented her family. They thought she had a good reason to: while nobody could blame her mother for dying on the birth bed, they could certainly malign her father for deciding, one fine morning, to leave for work and never come back home. They could click their tongues at the absence of any sense of responsibility, lament at how Serah was oh, young, too young to be anything but another mouth for her one and only older sibling to feed. Talking about her situation – how she had to age a decade in a single day, how she had to step away from a scholarship and a better future in order to join the military – made them feel better, it seemed, about their own lives.

 

One thing that Lightning would never tell them, of course, was that while she used to use her anger at her father to get her through the day, she had never hated her sister. Having her world pulled out from under her feet and forcing her to become a mother at fifteen, in fact, might have stopped her from becoming one of the very girls she hated: someone careless and vapid, whose worst fear was breaking a nail.

 

Maybe, in a way, Serah had become her one purpose for everything. Maybe, in the course of this crazy pilgrimage that she had been forced to take with people she normally wouldn’t give the time of day to, she was coming to realize that it wasn’t fair, that she was using her love and devotion as a means to keep her sister for herself. She wondered if Serah had always known that, and it was the reason why she had never spoken to Lightning about what she was to become.

 

Perhaps she would ask her sister later, once everything was over.


End file.
